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Welcome to Star Compass!
What’s inside this week:
🧑🚀 This Week’s Mission: How do you find the focus for the most important work?
🌌 This Week in Space: Three things you may have missed this week.
🚀 Ask a Rocket Scientist: Why is this newsletter called Star Compass?
🔭 Next Step: Block your time.
THIS WEEK’S MISSION
How do you find the focus for the most important work?
When you are expected to dive deep, you need to learn how to do deep work.
At Amazon, one of the leadership principles called Dive Deep is that leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.
It is not micromanagement, a trap some leaders I worked with at Amazon fell into. Micromanagement is taking over tasks, stripping autonomy, and constantly breathing down their team’s necks.
Diving deep is understanding the system, asking detailed questions, and empowering your team with clarity.
Amazon uses mechanisms to take inputs and transform them into outputs to address a recurring business challenge. A mechanism is a complete process with a virtuous cycle that reinforces and improves itself as it operates. Examples include dashboards, audits, and reviews that naturally surface details without manual hovering.
The current Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, explains Dive Deep further in this video: https://youtu.be/trHT6thsoZ0?si=iVrL858lgcWHKhUS. Those who understand strategy, but also the details at the lowest level of execution, do well at Amazon or anywhere else.
To Dive Deep, you need to know how to do Deep Work. Cal Newport, in his 2016 book Deep Work (#ad), defines it as professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
This contrasts with Shallow Work that often competes with and consumes our day, not letting us perform Deep Work. Shallow Work is defined by Newport as noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Shallow Work includes email, social media, internet surfing, chat tools like Slack, unstructured meetings without a clear purpose, and other work that stays high-level and doesn’t deliver value.
In Deep Work, Newport suggested four key rules:
Work deeply by cultivating a routine to include deep focus into your daily life.
Embrace boredom by training your brain to resist the distraction of constant stimulation that surrounds us. Even small bursts of these activities can break your focus.
Quit social media by eliminating tools based on whether their positive impact outweighs their negative fragmentation of attention.
Drain the shallows by scheduling every minute of your day, reducing shallow obligations, and limiting low-value tasks.
But Newport didn’t stop with Deep Work. He released in 2019 Digital Minimalism (#ad), focused primarily on rules 2 and 3. This was followed by A World Without Email (#ad) in 2021, tackling one of the lowest-value tasks that often eat away at our days and the time to do Deep Work. Finally, in 2024, he published Slow Productivity (#ad), which shared the wisdom of past deep thinkers to transform our modern jobs.
I have read all these books and done my best to apply his many recommendations. It is not easy, but I find that when I am staying true to these ideas is when I do my best work. The one strategy that helps the most is called time blocking.
Newport admits he didn’t invent it, crediting Benjamin Franklin, who states in his autobiography, “Every part of my business should have its allotted time.” He then provides a sample of how he divided his waking hours into blocks, each dedicated to a productive activity.
More recently, Peter Drucker, in his famous 1967 classic, The Effective Executive (#ad), states, “Effective executives do not start with their tasks. They start with their time.” With the success of Cal Newport’s books, many knowledge workers, including myself, have adopted time blocking.
Most people, and I often fall into this trap myself, approach their day by trying to cross things off a task list in the windows of time between attending meetings and reacting to emails and instant messages. Time blocking, by contrast, enables you to create a plan for your time, as opposed to simply reacting to whatever demand comes your way. It offers you a sense of autonomy and calm within the tornado of daily life.
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS
State of Product reveals what AI still hasn’t solved
80% of product professionals say AI helps them ship faster, but customers aren’t seeing value any sooner. Atlassian’s State of Product 2027 explores the gains AI is delivering and the challenges that remain, from decision-making that hasn’t kept pace to gut instinct overriding customer evidence.
THIS WEEK IN SPACE
📡 OPPORTUNITY: The 2027 Matthew Isakowitz Commercial Space Scholarship applications are open until Friday, November 6, 2026.
It is for graduate students with a career interest in commercial space, giving a space policy grounding to complement future work as an engineer or program manager in commercial space.
It places its selected cohort in full-time internships with host organizations in the Washington, DC Metro Area for the summer of 2027. Along with the internship is a summer speaker series and mentorship opportunities with peers and executives.
I was fortunate enough to know Matthew and work with Josh Ingersoll, the Scholarship Executive Director. Learn more at: https://matthewisakowitzfoundation.org
📚RESOURCE: Deep work is one path towards more focus and less stress.
Eric Partaker and Dr. Christian Poensgen, offer more in their book Ultraproductive, coming out Tuesday, October 20, 2026.
Order here on Amazon: https://link.amazon/B00Osq4Fl (#ad) and then go to the Ultra Labs book page: https://ultra-labs.com/book/#preorder-bonus to claim your bonuses.
They include a 5-week class, the Ultraproductive Accelerator with the authors, a framework library with the most important methods from the book, and the self-paced Peak Performance Program, a 5-week self-paced online program.
I have ordered my copy. You should order yours.
🌎 COMMUNITY: One of the best opportunities for university students to explore an aerospace career is coming up January 11, 2027.
The Career Accelerator Program (CAP) is held in conjunction with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SciTech program in Orlando, Florida, January 11-15, 2027.
It offers students interactions with engineers, recruiters, and industry leaders through a series of workshops. These include professional headshots, mock interviews, and resume building that can help you stand out in the competitive aerospace industry.
It is a great way to get more involved with the aerospace community.
Learn more here: https://scitech.aiaa.org/program/career-accelerator-program/
Please use these two options to give feedback. Be generous about what is and isn't working.
ASK A ROCKET SCIENTIST
Why is this newsletter named Star Compass?
- A frequent question from my readers.
Vikings or other Western civilizations often are considered the greatest ocean explorers, but they do not compare to the Polynesian and Austronesian ocean navigators who systematically crossed and settled millions of square miles of the open Pacific Ocean without maps or modern instruments.
Between roughly 1000 BC and 1200 AD, these voyagers traversed a triangular region from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the southwest and Easter Island in the east.
The star compass was developed by ancient Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers as a mental construct in Pacific Island wayfinding. The star compass is not a physical device; rather, it is a conceptual model of 150 to 220 rising and setting stars, combined with deep-body sensing of ocean swells, bird flight paths, cloud formations, and wind patterns.
These techniques had a modern revival, notably with Micronesia’s Mau Piailug, who famously guided the double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976, teaching a new generation of master navigators.
First learning about the Star Compass from the We, the Navigators book by David Lewis (#ad) inspired me to name my newsletter about navigating your space career after these ancient techniques.
Got a question about navigating your aerospace career? Reply and ask. I’ll answer the best ones right here.
THE NEXT STEP
Now that you have learned about the key to Deep Work, time blocking, put it into practice.
Block time off on your calendar every day for all your activities by assigning specific work to them.
You will have to remain flexible when some demands come that you can’t ignore.
But start by preserving 90 minutes of deep work in your day and protect them while flexing everything else. You will find that these 90 minutes will lead to a very productive day.
Managing your time versus managing your tasks will increase the useful work you complete and reduce your daily anxiety of always reacting.
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Reader. Star Compass. Out.